Posthegemonic Comments
Fascinating. Wish I'd been there for the discussion and the whole panel. Any discussion of the implications for contemporary "privateers" such as those used by the U.S. in Iraq?
Yeah, there was some discussion of the contemporary privatization of violence.
Personally, I reckon that the epoch in which the state behaved the way it is supposed to (in the Weberian sense), as the sole purveyor of legitimate violence, was probably rather a blip in world history.
And it was good to meet you, if only briefly.
William Walker was one evil bastard.
Dear Jon,
first of all I was happy to meet you in Miraflores and, again, excuse me for the family-related chaos and rush you get exposed to.
Anyway quite ironically without having read your recent work on piracy I also ended up using a Deleuzeguattarian framework to analyse the relationship between the mercenary and the state. Nevertheless I have to admit I interpreted the relationship between nomadism (the war machine, or in their words “la machine de guerre”) and the state (l’appareil de capture de l’etat, that I think I could translate as “the state apparatus of capture”) somehow differently. Indeed it seems to me that the war-machine cannot be defined as “an absolute outside” in relationship with the state but, at the opposite as a form that is continually presupposed by the state. The state, at least in my interpretation of Mille Plateux, can construct itself only relying and capturing the war-machine represented by the nomadic populations as the Mongols but in general by the potential for violence implicit in non-state formations as the “mercenary cargo” as well. Illuminating I think in this sense is a passage in mille plateux referring directly to the mercenary as a political figure:
Il corpo speciale e, soprattutto, lo schiavo-infedele-straniero è colui che diviene soldato e credente, pur restando deterritorializzato rispetto ai lignaggi dello stato […] Si tratta di un’invenzione della macchina da guerra, che gli stati continueranno ad utilizzare, di adeguare ai loro fini, fino al punto di renderla irriconoscibile o di ripresentarla sotto forma burocratica di stato maggiore o in forma tecnocratica di corpi molto particolari che servono lo stato almeno quanto gli resistono” (G.Deleuze, F.Guattari, Mille piani. Capitalismo e schizofrenia, cit, pp.505-506)
Again I try a do-it-yourself translation:
The special military units and, first of all, the slave-unfaithful(?)-stranger is whom who becomes soldier and believer, even if remaining deterritorialized in his relationship with the state. It is an invenction of the war-machine, that the states will continue to use, to adapt to their aims, up to the point of making it unrecognizable or of misrepresenting it in the bureaucratic form of the army or in the technocratic form of very special military units which serve the state at least as much as they resist it”.
The apparatus of capture of the state therefore is dependent on the war-machine for the creation of its coercive capacities – and this is clearly true for example when we analyse the pivotal role played by privateers as Drake and Lord Raleigh in the rise and rise of the British Navy. In Janice Thomson words “Privateering was invented and encouraged by the strong states of Europe whose naval power was largely an outgrowth of privateering” (p.26) – but this capture of the coercive force of the privateer, of the mercenary and so on it is always unstable and partial (the mercenary, the privateer "serve the state at least as much as they resist it” ). The state tries always to stabilise its relationship with the war-machine that adopts within itself through regulation and discipline. The delegitimation and suppression of privateering are therefore attempts by the state to further “ misrepresent” the war-machine, an attempt “to adapt it to its aims”. Nevertheless, even the modern army – that is somehow the apogee of the neutralization of the war-machine in a tool fully disposable by the state - , pace Clausewitz, it is always a body that can turn itself against the state (coup d’etat and so on) or thoroughly exit the state and go back to anomic form of violence as shown by one of the most characteristic figures of the so-called “new wars”: the sobel (soldier during the day, rebel at night).
As you very well put it in your last sentente:
In other words, the question of nomadism may not simply be that of the state taking over the war machine (as Deleuze and Guattari suggest) but also the ways in which the state itself becomes immanent, at the frayed edges of its territorial power, at the liminal margins of Empire: the ways in which, in short, the state itself generates its own nomads.
Nevertheless it seems to me that this “tension” between the war machine and the state, this impossibility of the state to fully neutralize the anomic pulsing implicit in the war-machine is something that we can find already in Deleuze and Guattari description of state formation.
Hope to see you sooner or later in Zavalita’s country,
Amedeo
PS:
I also found inspiring this passage:
“As such, privateers (and the closely related private men-of war) were extensions of the state’s juridical and military apparatus in those areas of the world beyond its formal control, or its ability for direct regulation…
the raison d’être for privateering began to wane. After all, if the Navy could now take on the role of monitoring privateering on the high seas, it would be even more efficient for it to perform directly the self-same functions for which privateering was invented.
I wonder thus if the increasing legitimation ( by states as England by the way with its recent Green Paper) of private military company acting at the liminal margins of Empire could be interpreted as an attempt at “indirect government” or governamentality. It would follow that either “these areas are beyond Empire’s ability for direct regulation” or that it is not true anymore that “it would be even more efficient for [the state] to perform directly the self-same functions [the accumulation of coercive power and capital I would say, or order more generally] for which privateering was invented”. The analysis of piracy and mercenarism at the end raise the question of the ultimate source of globalization/governance: is the shift from government to governance the result of another efficient adaptation of power or is the result of the crumble of old systems of control? In other words is it the signal of a post-modern adaptation or of a regressive neomedievalism?
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